Senior Application Security Engineer

Wave HQ; United States; Remote; USD 167,000 - 204,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Retirement contributions

Parental leave (6 months)

Fertility assistance

Flexible vacation

Charitable donation matching

Annual travel to Africa

Job summary

Wave HQ is seeking an experienced security engineer to own application security across multiple teams, aligning with product and infrastructure to raise security standards. You will shape guardrails for AI-enabled workflows and protect customer trust with robust security practices.

You’ll work within a small security team, focusing on both code security reviews and governance of AI usage, with a stack including Python, GraphQL, Postgres, and cloud technologies.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 7-8 years of professional experience with a minimum of 3-5 years in a security-related role.
• Strong experience with Python.
• Fluent English.

Responsibilities

• Secure application security across multiple product teams and systems.
• Define and enforce guardrails for AI-powered workflows and agent tooling.
• Lead security reviews of public-facing APIs and internal components.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to improve security posture.

Skills

Python

Cloud technologies

Security

Tools

GraphQL

Postgres

GCP

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Our mission

We’re making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That’s for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We’re solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don’t always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that’s where you come in…

How you’ll help us achieve it

We’re looking for an experienced security engineer who’s independent, excited about getting things done, and ready to hit the ground running. You’ll primarily be responsible for our application security, working with our product teams to work on new systems to enhance our security posture. Our customers trust us with their money, and you’ll be at the forefront of making sure we retain that trust!

This broadly scoped role will allow you to get your hands on many different types of security projects, from direct application security to helping our infrastructure team think about security for our databases.

As we integrate AI-powered agents into our engineering and operations workflows, you’ll help define and enforce the guardrails around how we use them safely. This includes securing agentic tooling against prompt injection, excessive permissions, and data exfiltration — and building the policies and technical controls to govern AI usage across the company.

Some experience with common industry certifications like ISO-27001 and PCI-DSS would be beneficial, although you won’t be expected to run or oversee audits.

Our to-do list changes constantly, but here are some recent projects:

• Design our agentic SIEM/SecOps pipelines to evaluate and tune AI-driven triage, alerting, and response automation
• Secure our MCP integrations against prompt injection, tool misuse, and credential exposure
• Tune and maintain code security review agents tailored to Wave’s codebase, threat model, and regulatory environment
• Develop internal AI governance standards covering acceptable use, data handling, and audit requirements for LLM-powered tools
• Centralise application-level login and permissions enforcement including privileged access management
• Rework our approach to secrets management with ephemerals secrets and tighter access scopes
• Security review of our public-facing APIs

Key details

• You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable internet access.

• Wave covers travel once per year to one of our operating countries in Africa, as well as a yearly stipend of $1200 to meet with coworkers.

• Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, depending on your level of experience, we offer a salary of up to $185,800 USD (or local equivalent), plus a generous equity.

• We run performance reviews twice a year and award bonuses or promotions to strong performers who have been with the company for more than six months

• Major benefits:

  • Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country-to-country).
  • 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance.
  • Flexible vacation, with most folks taking between 30-40 days per year.
  • $10,000 annual charitable donation matching.
  • Yearly travel to one of our African operating countries.

Requirements

• Minimum of 7-8 years of professional experience with a minimum of 3-5 years of it spent in a security-related role
• Strong Experience with Python.
• Fluent English.

You might be a good fit if you

• Are excited about finding the right balance between security and velocity.
• Have opinions on how to secure agentic AI systems and want to put them into practice
• Enjoy helping other engineers understand and implement secure patterns.
• Are not afraid to take on complicated systems.
• Are excited to work on lots of different security-related work, from audits to code refactors.
• Work to make things easier for the next engineer who will touch your code.
• Always try to improve as a programmer and colleague.
• Are interested in building governance frameworks for AI usage in a regulated financial services environment
• Have experimented with LLM-based security tooling and understand both the promise and the failure modes
• Push through hard problems without giving up.
• Have experience remediating non-conformities.Are interested in security-focused source code review and penetration testing.
• Have an interest in growing and mentoring a team.

About Engineering at Wave

You’ll report to the Security Team Lead and work closely with the CISO, as part of a small 4 person security team, likely rotating with many of our Product and Platform teams, depending on the project you’re working on. Each team is led by a product manager and mentored by a technical lead on the team.

You’ll be responsible for your own security projects as well as supporting the engineering organisation on security through advice and design review. We organize things to give you as much ownership as possible, so you’ll typically be in charge of your projects from planning to delivery.

Our stack (you only need prior experience with python and cloud technologies, if you need to work with anything else, we’ll train you):

• backend: Python 3 (+ mypy)
• API layer: GraphQL
• Android frontend: Kotlin/Jetpack
• iOS frontend: Swift/SwiftUI
• web frontend: TypeScript/React
• database: Postgres
• infrastructure: GCP / Terraform
• orchestration: Kubernetes

Our team

• We have a rapidly growing in-country team in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon plus remote team members spread across the world.
• We’re deeply passionate about our mission of bringing radically affordable financial services to the people who need them most.
• We foster autonomy for our employees. You’ll own your projects at every stage, from understanding the problem to monitoring your solution in production.
• We raised the largest Series A in Africa in 2021. Our world-class investors, include Founders Fund, Sequoia Heritage, Stripe, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator, and Partech Africa.
• We are on Y Combinator’s top companies by revenue.

Wave is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.